Bay of Tweets

Let’s hand it to the U.S. government: At least this disastrous attempt to overthrow the Castro brothers did not almost lead to nuclear annihilation. But its impact on activists around the world who use digital tools to organize against repressive regimes feels devastating enough.

Most Popular

Over the years, U.S. efforts to relieve Cuba of its communist government have included invasion attempts, Mafia contracts, poisoned cigars and wetsuits and pirate TV broadcasts. So far, all have been unsuccessful except in courting disaster or embarrassment for the United States. This time, every authoritarian leader in the world was just handed a golden talking point to justify their suppression of the Internet: a faux “Cuban Twitter” secretly launched and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with the aim of nudging along regime change in Cuba.

This metaphorical poisoned cigar was “ZunZuneo,” a social network named after the Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s tweet and conceived and built by a large Beltway contractor and its overseers at USAID. On one level, it might not have seemed like such a crazy idea: They knew what Internet scholarship has shown: Non-threatening platforms that let ordinary citizens get together to banter about everyday life and exchange jokes are more powerful in the long run than openly political sites. They attract a large user base, build community and are harder for governments to target.

Although the tightly controlled Cuban Internet had no such platform, ordinary cell phones with text capability were becoming widespread. ZunZuneo was launched as a text-message based social network in which Cubans wealthy enough to own cell phones could follow and message each other for a mere 4 cents per text—cheap because USAID, through a front company in Spain, subsidized the cost. The agency also paid Havana-born artists to compose messages for the system, without disclosing the origin or the aim of the project. They used a secretly obtained list of half-a-million Cuban cell phone numbers to blast users, urging them to sign up and taking opportunities like carefully selected musical events as tests of ZunZeneo’s power.The idea was to gradually start introducing political messages and even, somewhere down the line, inspire Cubans to trigger Arab Spring-like mass protests. As one USAID document quoted by the Associated Press put it, the overall aim was to “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”

One might have hoped that someone asked the question: What if we succeed?

People do like social networking and indeed, tens of thousands of Cubans signed up and started using the cheap service—at its height, the system hosted more than 40,000 users. But a platform secretly run by the U.S. government could not become a major social network in Cuba without being exposed at some point, so the contractors looked for ways to hide ZunZeneo’s origins, including operating it from other countries and spoofing Internet addresses. Meanwhile, the service polled unsuspecting Cubans on seemingly innocuous matters, such as their views of slightly dissident rock groups, and data-mined the responses to assemble political profiles of those who responded. It all seemed to be working according to plan.

ZunZuneo’s growing popularity posed a problem, though: The cost of all those texts was adding up. So USAIDtried to lure an outside CEO into taking it over, and invited Silicon Valley companies invest in it. There were no takers. After all, what sane company would take over an operation that involved forking over tens of thousands of dollars to the Cuban government in perpetuity to subsidize texts about the weather or music concerts? By mid-2012, the money had run out, and the service died.

One might have also hoped that someone in the U.S. government asked the question: What if we fail? What if we are found out?

The answer, I’m afraid, can be found in the fear and outrage that slowly filled my Facebook page on Thursday as online activists around the world found out about the project—a boneheaded idea tailor-made to taint social media as a tool of the United States, and the activists as useful idiots at best, and traitors at worst.

***

Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is assistant professor at the University of North Carolina and fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy.